I was surprised to find that David Frost was involved in the play Frost/Nixon, which later spawned the Hollywood movie and this opportunistic repackaging (rather disingenuously passed off as a ’sequel’ in a brief author’s note) of his earlier I Gave Them a Sword. Both play and movie portray Frost as a shallow, know-nothing, toothy idiot who stumbled into an interview with the freshly disgraced ex-President Nixon.
Of course I had forgotten that there is something more important to David Frost than his pride or reputation: money.
This book is a pretty feeble attempt to redress the balance of the impression given by the play and book. By Frost’s own account, filled with his characteristic lack of modesty, his interviews were a defining moment in Presidential and world history. Whereas, in fact, they are not even a footnote in modern biographies of Nixon.
The entire reputation of the project rests on the myth – ably puffed by Frost himself – that he somehow got Nixon to ‘confess’ to his Watergate crimes. In fact he did no such thing. When Frost has him on the hook, he suddenly releases the pressure and allows Nixon to go off on yet another sentimental ramble about ‘letting people down’ and how he cried just before making his resignation speech. In Frost’s world, this is what passes for an incisive interview.
Here’s the key section:
Frost: You explained that you got caught up in this thing [i.e. obstruction of justice] … you’ve explained your motives. I don’t want to quibble about any of that, but just coming to the sheer substance, would you go further than “mistakes”
This tells you everything you need to understand about Frost’s outlook. ‘Quibbling’ about the details of Nixon’s participation in a conspiracy to obstruct justice (from within the Oval Office!), is not his idea of ’substance’. No, he’d rather get Nixon on tape having a little blub instead.
Nixon’s preparation for the interviews was incredibly impressive. He had committed details of not only what he and his associates had said in public and in private, but what he’d been publicly revealed to have said. As soon as Frost mentions a quote from a tape that had not been made public at that time, Nixon makes sure to understand where the quote is coming from, so that he can decide whether to brazen it out or not. This shows that Nixon’s basic approach – that had failed him so badly during Watergate – was to lie first, and try to tie up to loose ends as they appeared, and had not changed even after the trauma of being, in effect, removed from office.
A more skilled interviewer than Frost might have been able to pull at the fraying edges of Nixon’s defence and unravel the whole thing. As it is, all we’re left with is the tantalising prospect of Nixon actually admitting to crimes. From a legal point of view, he would have been protected by President Ford’s pardon. Instead we’re left with the satisfaction that history has passed its own verdict, in spite of Frost’s interview.
The non-Watergate parts of the book – and these make up the majority of it – are very routine and boring, especially now that they are somewhat dead issues. The true extent of Nixon’s disastrous handling of the Vietnam war, Chile and other things are poorly served by this book.
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